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"Politician Effort and Voter Inference" (PDF file)
Author: John W. Patty and Roberto A. Weber
Abstract
This paper explores a psychologically motivated model of belief for-mation
in a political context. Using a retrospective voting framework, we
specifically examine the implications of a common inference bias in which
voters overweight the effect of an incumbent’s unobserved effort on realized
outcomes. This bias is motivated by and consistent with the fundamental at-tribution
error in social psychology, whereby people over-attribute the cause
of observed outcomes to personal and dispositional causes and underweigh
situational causes. We provide experimental evidence of this bias and show
that it leads to reduced incentives for the politician to exert effort on the
voters’ behalf.
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